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The Dominican Republic Zombie Adventure
Session 1 An interlude in the Tavistoc Expeditions Adventure when the party were waiting for contract magicians and physical items in the adventure Sancta Henrietta della Cordoba. Most of this session was spent gathering intelligence from Mama du Tonniere, and planning. There are two sorts of zombies, she told the party, the dead and the living. The dead ones need to be ‘put to rest’ by destroying their brains, or they can be attacked with salt which also destroys them. The living ones are more of a problem – just as nasty as the dead, but they are still living. When the fetish which allows spirits from another dimension to take them over is destroyed they will return to normal, so they should not be killed. Worried about the effects of long-term zombieism on the living victims, Mama duT only allowed them one day to prepare for the journey. The information they had was that zombies – both ‘living’ and undead – had crossed the ridgeline between Mama duT’s valley and the neighbouring one protected by Mama Deveraux. (Though they speak Spanish, it’s a tradition that voodoo practitioners take French names since the religion originated on the French part of the island.) Both are animated by the same kind of evil spirits, which take over and control human bodies – never animals. When they come through a rift from ‘de bad place’ they can seize the dead in their graves or overpower the living. Sufficiently strong-minded individuals can resist being taken over, which explains why some of the evil spirits choose the comparatively easy route of taking over a dead body. Evil spirits in control of a body have access to its memories, so they know the layout of the area around their homes, walls and ditches, etc. Most of them use weapons the body knows well – farm tools, etc., though if one is/was a hunter the evil spirit might well know how to use its guns. If Mama Deveraux still lives, the spirit inside her will have access to her magic. Most of it is beneficial – she, like Mama duT is a healer and has powers to boost farms’ and animals’ fecundity – but she does have a passion for fire and is quite good at conjuring flames. Zombies walk a little slower than average humans, at least for the first few days till the spirits get full control of their bodies. Animals fear them, able to detect the ‘wrongness’ about the spirits inhabiting the bodies whether they be live or dead. Dead zombies also appear to recognise the spirits within living ones and don’t attack them. The evil spirits will have been released into the world by a ceremony that presumably went wrong. The channel to the other world will be held open by a fetish. If the fetish is destroyed, the channel is closed but the evil spirits remain in this world, so the possessed will not recover. Only if a strong voodoo practitioner binds the fetish with the proper spells will the spirits be forced back into the ‘bad place’. When that happens, the dead zombies will die again, the living recover, though suffering any injuries etc. that they incurred during their possession. The plan is that the party will get Mama duT to the place where the fetish is, and stop any zombies interfering while she binds it. They ‘tooled up’ with an unusual assortment of weapons: fishing nets, large shields, baseball bats, and Albert even took a boathook. Since there is no access to the village suitable for motor vehicles, they borrowed a two-mule cart for their supplies and to carry Mama duT, and a couple of riding mules for Willie and Mrs Stanley. Haggart would drive the cart, Donald and Albert ride on it, and Kohath preferred to walk. They chose mules as steadier beasts, less likely to panic around zombies. On arrival in Mama duT’s valley they interviewed the locals, and came to the conclusion that killing a zombie by destroying the brain released the evil spirit. The drawback was that it didn’t vanish, but possessed a new body. A couple of the locals had felt something trying to ‘invade’ them, but thought it was their imagination till Kohath asked them about it and they realised that they weren’t the only ones. And someone in that fight had wandered off into the woods, strangely quiet, when the fight was over – they hadn’t gone after him because they were more concerned about getting the children back to safety. The party decided that they were going to leave the zombie heads intact so the spirits didn’t take over one of them! Their first encounter was with a local farmer on Mama duT’s side of the ridge. Mama duT recognised him and called out, but he did not respond with words. As he walked closer, Willie dismounted and prepared his net. When Kohath announced his diagnosis of zombieism, Willie ran in and cast his net nicely. With the zombie wrapped in its folds, the party had no trouble knocking him down and tying him up. A little more experimentation showed that, like Mama duT’s spells, the zombie could not detect the psi-blockers Kohath and Willie. They hauled the unfortunate farmer-zombie up a tree and secured him there so that no wild animals or other zombies would attack him, marked the tree with bright cloths (“Tie a yellow ribbon round the zom-bie tree…”) and moved on. Their next encounter was more startling. Well into the ‘dangerous’ valley, three zombies – two living and one dead – stepped out from the high sugar cane, startling their mules. The wagon and Mrs Stanley stampeded off into the canefields, crashing through the thick stalks. Albert, desperately clutching his boathook, fell off the wagon and hurt himself pretty badly. Only Willie and Kohath were initially effective: Willie controlling his mule long enough to dismount with a net, Kohath readying his shotgun and closing the distance. All three zombies ignored Kohath and Albert, concentrating on Willie. Willie cast his net badly this time – it draped over the zombie’s shoulder, not inconveniencing his machete arm at all. In return, he cut deep into Willie’s left arm with that machete, and the dead zombie beside him buried his hoe in Willie’s left leg. Both limbs were crippled, Willie was crumpled on the floor, and the hoe was deeply embedded. At the end of Round 2, it looked bad. Things turned around quickly. The stampeding mules, foiled by the thick sugarcane, came to a standstill. Mrs Stanley turned hers around and Donald and Haggart leapt off the cart and ran back carrying more nets. Kohath’s first shotgun blast ripped apart the dead zombie’s spine. It folded in half, but still hung onto the Willie limped up and managed to get his boathook through the third zombie’s belt and pull him backwards. The zombie looked baffled – its controlling spirit couldn’t work out why it was going the wrong way when it couldn’t see Albert, and its flailing arms couldn’t reach him because of the length of the boathook. The machete-zombie missed his next attack, and in rolling around Willie managed to free the hoe from his leg, at the cost of more damage that made him grit his teeth to remain conscious. But Kohath put his shotgun to the back of the dead zombie’s neck, severing it with the blast from his second barrel. Haggart and Donald arrived – Donald wasn’t much help but Haggart netted the machete-zombie neatly and the emergency was over. Mrs Stanley jumped off her mule and added her greater strength to Albert’s on the boathook. They could take their time securing both living zombies and suspending them in trees. Confirmation that the zombies could not see Kohath and Albert gave Kohath an idea. As the group closed in on Mama Deveraux’s home village, the majority of them went off to find a viewpoint from which they could watch the village, while Kohath and Albert went in. Their plan was to scout out the village, and even capture Mama D, unseen by the zombies. Only if they couldn’t bring out the fetish would they return for the rest of the group, and Mama D’s fire-raising ability would be neutralised by her being tied up and shoved in a cupboard somewhere. But as it turned out, all they found was a note on the door. From the similarity of some words to the shaky little bits of Italian they had picked up on their adventure with the Aesinas Codex, they worked out it was something about going to Pedro. They brought the note back and Mama duT translated it as ‘Gone to Pedro’s Landing’ – another village a couple of miles away. So on they travel… Session 2 Heading for Pedro’s Landing, the party were moving through farmland, which had the disadvantage that the zombies, doing their habitual activities, were around the farmhouses close to the road. Where they could, the party went off-road to avoid farmhouses, but with the high dense tropical vegetation (both natural and sugar-cane) they were forced to spend a lot of time on the road. The most crucial encounter involved no less than ten zombies, coming at them in two groups – one along the road from the nearest farmhouse, the other out of the fields. While Haggart turned the cart around, Willie and Mrs Stanley dismounted and left their mules free so that they could defend themselves. Naturally, as soon as they smelled the zombies and the gunfire started, they headed for the hills. Although the high vegetation had blocked the party’s view of the zombies till they were within 30 yards, they had time to start shooting out the legs of those who looked dead. That didn’t kill them, but it did slow them down as they had to crawl and would arrive at long intervals, allowing the humans to run around picking on each in turn, and of course being prone would make them more vulnerable. An unfortunate burst from Donald’s BAR took out not only the legs of one of the dead zombies but the living one behind him. It was a nasty shock when one of the zombies was carrying a loaded shotgun and fired it twice, managing to cripple Willie’s left arm again, but then failed to understand how to reload it and kept advancing, shooting an empty gun. Their tactic of shooting out the legs reduced the number of zombies they would have to face in hand-to-hand combat to a manageable three. Kohath advanced to take one down on his own by netting it. His first attempt failed, but on the second try he succeeded in wrapping the net around the zombie and pulling it over, pinning its net to the ground with its own hoe and a pitchfork taken from a crawling zombie. The rest of the group concentrated on the two remaining upright zombies, both possessed live men and therefore not to be seriously harmed. Albert’s previous success in hooking a zombie’s belt with his boathook was shown to be a fluke as he failed at several attempts to repeat it. But working together Donald and Mrs Stanley netted the other one and Haggart, arriving late after setting the wagon for Mama duT’s getaway if everything went wrong, brawled Albert’s target to the ground. Soon the living zombies were neatly tied up and the dead ones decapitated. Their heads were buried but not their bodies to save the work of digging bigger graves – and also to guarantee that if scavengers came around there would be enough meat on the surface to stop them digging and eating the heads, releasing the evil spirits to infest new bodies. Rather than hang them up trees, the living were deposited in a locked barn on the nearby farm after Kohath had healed the leg of the one they had accidentally shot as well as Willie’s arm. They debated whether to go after their riding-mules, but decided that chasing them around a zombie-filled countryside was probably a bad idea, as the afternoon was wearing on. The day advanced in a similar manner – lesser encounters not played through to avoid repetition now they had their tactics sorted out – until late afternoon. Rather than push on into Pedro’s Landing at dusk, they stopped and holed up in a farmhouse for the night. Next morning, after dealing with a group of zombies who’d gathered around the house overnight, they moved on to where they topped a hill overlooking Pedro’s Landing and saw the sunlight glinting off its giant spiderwebs. Yes, spiderwebs. Unexpectedly, the whole village of Pedro’s Landing was festooned with them. Haggart reckoned that they were from hunting/herding spiders who chase prey into their webs since they were not the classic circular webs used to hunt flying prey. From the thickness of the web that made it visible at this range (a mile away, but through binoculars) he estimated that the spiders would be somewhere between a large dog and a horse in size. They could just make out human figures standing still at the edges of the web. As they moved closer, there was much discussion about the sequence of events. Did Mama duT come to Pedro’s Landing to sort out a spider problem and the zombie-spirits were the by-product of her critical spell failure, or vice versa? Or was her business about neither, and both came through together? They realised that the countryside around seemed to be less populated with zombies than elsewhere. The gaps between the web-strands were clearly too small for their wagon, so they cached the wagon and mules in a farm close to the edge of the village and set out to explore… Session 3 The group decided that the safest way to take a close look at the village would be from the river. Although wide (50 yards) it was shallow: good protection from both zombies and spiders, and slow-flowing so not likely to be too dangerous. Surveying the riverbanks, they realised that there were no boats on their side, but they did spot one on the far side. Praying that their memory was right that caimans too small to threaten alert humans were the only serious carnivores in Caribbean rivers, Willie and Donald waded the river, having to resort to swimming briefly in the very middle, and brought the boat back. They observed more zombies on the far bank, confirming that the area of effect of the infestation was circular. First they looked more closely at the human figures standing at the edge of the village. They looked dead through binoculars, though strangely so. Their faces looked green, their arms puffy from the gases of decay, but their torsos looked normal. As the boat then drifted along the river, they did indeed see two giant spiders in the village, each about the size of a Shetland pony. One was high up on the church tower, the other nestled amongst its webs between two houses. Securing the boat to oars plunged into the riverbed to steady it as an aiming-platform, their three best shots (Donald, Albert, & Mrs Stanley) opened fire, two of them hitting their target. The spider scuttled down its webs into cover. Excited by the battle, Albert joined in. They moved to the second spider, again securing the boat and taking careful aim. This time all three hit, and the spider thrashed around in its death-throes. Suddenly from around a corner a third spider appeared and attacked the dying one. Another flurry of shots blasted it and it scuttled back into cover. They decided they had the measure of these monsters: they can survive two rifle-shots, but not three. Next, they decided to investigate the web strands, again using the river as protection. They eased close to the great strands attaching the jetties to onshore buildings, and Kohath used a hoe collected from a zombie to grab and pull one. It stretched and flexed, not breaking easily. As he tried to free the hoe, he realised that it was stuck fast. He pulled, twisted, and shook the hoe, and the twitching of the strands did what it always does: it brought the spider. This was no pony-sized spider lurking still in its lair: this was the size of a full-grown horse and it was charging at full pelt towards them, pedipalps rattling in a dire clamour that triggered panic in Donald and Mama duTonniere, both of whom baled out of the boat into the river and tried to flee for the far bank. As it charged along the jetty, everyone left aboard opened fire, blazing away as fast as they could as they suppressed the panic. The spider reached the end of the jetty and leapt into the boat, but the accumulating weight of lead smashing into its body was too much even for the cross-dimensional monster; it crashed into the boat and rolled over. As the boat rocked and surged under the impact, Willie fell overboard and Haggart fired his remaining barrel into the bottom of the boat, but a calmer Kohath fired his second barrel right into the body, finishing the monster. As the boat began to drift downstream, taking on water from both the shotgun damage in the bottom and the list from the overhanging spider, the party recovered from the brief but furious battle. Still fleeing through waist-deep water, Donald’s foot slipped in the mud, but as he ducked himself under the water the shock brought him back under control. He seized Mama duT’s arm and talked her down. Meanwhile, those back in the boat managed to heave the spider overboard and from long pearl-diving experience Willie pulled himself back into the boat. They retreated to find material to fix the damage to the boat – fortunately, not a full hole through the planks, but enough splintering and stretching to let a good flow of water through. They decided to abandon the river approach for now: confined in the boat they were too vulnerable if another spider managed to jump aboard. They prepared two methods of countering the web: flaming torches, and blankets and sack-cloth from a nearby farm to drape over the sticky strands. They brought the boat in close and tied it up nearby for a quick retreat, with Albert guarding it, as they approached a narrow gap between two buildings. Closer to the zombies, they could see the reason for the lack of torso swelling: great holes punched in their abdomens. Haggart was able to explain: some spiders pierce their prey with external mouthparts and inject stomach acids, then suck out the contents when they are an acidic stew. Clearly, all the formerly-living zombies now standing around the edge of the webs had suffered that fate. There was no swelling because the torsos were hollow, and pierced. The first experiment was with fire. It worked, the web strand sizzling and burning through, but it was slow. It took a full minute to burn through, till the ends pinged away. The party were getting ready to try something else when the spider attacked, approaching stealthily before leaping from the cover of one of the buildings. The party therefore got off its first flurry of snapshots before having to resist the panic of the chattering pedipalps. Once again Donald turned to run, but this time the spider was closer and leapt onto his back, sinking its fangs in deep and injecting venom. Satisfied that he was done, the spider next went for Willie, leaping from Donald’s falling body to the sailor, but Willie managed to dodge it. Being blasted by the massed guns of the party, the spider turned again and hurled itself at Haggart, sinking its fangs in but being blasted to death before it could inject more than a token amount of venom. With Donald unsteady on his feet from a combination of wounds, venom, and stark terror, Kohath rushed over and started treating him immediately. Mrs. Stanley wanted Donald moved to the boat so that the wounded could be treated in safety, which started a blazing row with Kohath, who refused to allow his patient to be moved until the venom was neutralised and the wounds staunched. By the time that was done, Haggart, who had been waiting patiently for treatment while suffering a combination of spider-bite and venom, had also collapsed. With their healer – and his magic powerstone – just about exhausted, the party retired to their ‘safe’ farmhouse for lunch and rest. It took most of the afternoon for Kohath’s breathing disciplines to restore his fatigue, and though they were tempted to settle down for the night, the question of what impact another day of not eating, drinking, etc. would have on the living zombies persuaded Mama duT to press them into going again as the afternoon drew towards tiffin-time. Session 4 With Kohath’s power restored, they discussed the probabilities with Mama duT. She reckoned that it was unlikely that one incident brought out two such dissimilar outcomes. The most likely sequence was that the spiders broke through first somehow – if the zombies had been first, Mama D would have still been home as a zombie, as no-one would have come to bring her to where the spiders were. Mama D was called for and went to Pedro’s Landing to deal with the spiders, but fouled up somehow and blew open a portal through which the evil spirits came to possess bodies. While thinking about it, Mrs Stanley came up with the idea of wearing another layer of clothes. If they found themselves stuck to the webbing, they could lose this extra layer quickly and painlessly. Everyone scrounged another layer of clothes from the farmhouse they were using, and wore them despite the tropical warmth. First, they checked the outskirts of the village in case the ceremony that went wrong had been conducted outside it to avoid the spiders. They found no sign of that. So they decided to stand off and pick off as many spiders as possible from a distance. They tried drifting downstream in a boat again, tugging at the web-strands as they passed. The only response to that was a sighting of a human figure standing at a window in the village – but the fly-screen obscured all the details. Tugging the web threads did not tempt any more giant spiders out to the attack, either from the river or the land. So eventually they decided to go in through the shortest route to the centre: through the graveyard. Firstly they ripped away the fly-screen from the window in the end wall of the house next to the graveyard and bypassed the tangle of web threads attaching the outermost corner to gravestones and the graveyard wall. Reassuringly, there were neither zombies nor giant spiders in the house and they moved through to the front door, overlooking the graveyard. Sticking his arm out of a window, Kohath clumsily hacked away at the nearest web-strand with a machete. With the odd angle and his inexperience with machetes, it took him quite a while to cut through the tough, springy thread. The ominous news was that the thrashing of the web did not attract any more spiders – clearly, the party thought, they had plans beyond the animal-level instinctive ones they had used before. They stepped out of the front door and made their way to the side wall of the church, ending up by the sacristy door. Since most of the web-strands were running that way it was fairly simple to avoid the cross-strands. The plan was to move through the church to come out in the marketplace right in the centre of the village. But Mrs. Stanley took the time to look through a window and saw thirty or more zombies standing inside watching the sacristy door, so that plan changed rapidly. They moved along the sidewall of the church. Ironically, it was the well-prepared Mrs. Stanley who came to grief: she overbalanced when stepping over a web, and fell into another strand. While Albert stayed back to help her out of the shift she was wearing over her own clothes, the rest of the party reached the corner and looked out at the webstrewn market square. They were promptly seen by Mama D – or rather, by the spirit inhabiting her body. She cried out a warning. Two giant spiders rolled off house roofs and scuttled down the web towards them, and zombies started emerging from the church’s main door. The spiders were again rattling away with their pedipalps to produce their unearthly drumming that terrified Donald (again), and this time both Mrs Stanley and Albert joined him in panicked flight, although Mrs S, still held fast in the web, did not get very far!The flight of the others . It didn’t last long either: both Albert and Donald ran full-force into webbing and were pinned strongly, Mrs Stanley writhed around and wrapped herself even more strongly into the strands that held her. The remaining party members blasted away at the nearest spider as it skidded down the web towards them, killing it just as it came within reach. Meanwhile, across the road Mama D conjured a jet of fire, but Haggart managed to dodge it. The zombies shambled closer, ignored, but then they were stopped by the web. Kohath and Willie switched their fire to the second spider, again dropping it at the last moment with point-blank shotgun blasts while Haggart changed targets and shot back at Mama D for daring to target him. His shot hit her right arm and left him with an empty shotgun. Kohath reloaded quickly while Haggart was still reaching for cartridges. Willie kept blasting zombies as they brought massive pressure on the web holding them back. As far as Willie and Haggart could see, Mama D just vanished. Next round Kohath could still see her (being immune to her psychic invisibility) and had one round up the spout so he blasted her, again hitting her right arm and taking her down, but at that point the web ripped loose under the weight of pushing zombies and they stumbled towards the fighters. With the spiders dead and their pedipalps silenced, Donald and Albert threw off the effects of the fear and pulled themselves free of the web by getting out of the extra layer of clothing, but Mrs Stanley had fully flipped by now, helplessly wrapped up in the web with a gun-battle raging around her and the moan of zombies coming ever closer… Kohath, Willie and Haggart retreated slowly, blasting the front zombies’ legs away. Donald joined in quickly, while Albert struggled to free his rifle from the tangled web. They couldn’t run till Mrs Stanley could be freed, but every time they blasted the legs out from under a zombie it kept crawling closer and grabbing at their legs. Finally. Mama duT managed to cut the web-strands holding Mrs Stanley and the party could grab her, still wrapped and screaming, and run around the zombie pack, avoiding more web, to secure the house where Mama D’s body lay. They pinioned Mama D quickly and barred all the doors and window shutters. Kohath estimated the safe anaesthetic dosage for her and deliberately exceeded it to keep her evil spirit under control. At least, that was his excuse… but then he did surgically amputate her ruined right arm and bind up the stump properly. Mama duT promised to work regeneration magic on her later. The fetish they were looking for hung eight feet above the middle of the street, tangled in web and visible to all the zombies who had now emerged from the surrounding houses. Willie broke through the roof thatch and cut the attachment points on their house, dropping the fetish in the street. In order to redeem himself for achieving nothing in the climactic fight, Albert volunteered to run out and fetch it. Neatly sidestepping both web strands and ambling zombies, he managed to cut it loose and bring it back without incident. Safe inside a secured house, Mama duT had all the time she needed for a ceremony which blocked the access to this dimension by the evil spirits. The zombies in town dropped instantly – over the days they had been possessed, all of them had been sucked hollow by the spiders. Out in the countryside, the possessed living recovered control of their own bodies, suffering slightly from their experience but the worst effects of dehydration and hunger had been blocked by the psychic energy imparted by the spirits. Checking around the village, the players found in relief that the other spiders which they had wounded earlier had all died from their wounds, which explained why they hadn’t faced more in the final confrontation. The locals in Mama duT’s valley moved in to help their surviving neighbours, and also to throw a party for the player-characters. A lot of rum was drunk before the party moved unsteadily back to Ciudad Trujillo to find out how Casey was doing with assembling wizards and equipment for their dive. Category:Adventures